The Martial Unity

All those months of preparation had paid off. The many months that he spent scraping up passive patterns in the Root's movements and the two large-scale battles in which he had spent gathering its active patterns had paid off.

The predictive model that he consequently built was functional. Rui could see its attacks coming from a mile away, sometimes literally. The passive cues and tells warned him of every attack, while the previous attacks and the positions and timings allowed him to see even further into the future.

The predictive model he had on the Root was still not quite as powerful as the one that he had on Kane, but it was not too far behind either.

The sheer insight he had on the Root's future movements was quite remarkable, yet it became scary when those same movements became too fast for him to react to with his own reflexes. His own movements were on par with the faster grade-ten Martial Artists, his eyes could barely catch them, and they were almost entirely over before he could react.

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH!

Rui somersaulted through the air at hypersonic speeds as he gracefully evaded five root attacks converging on his location. His mind had predicted eight more attacks from ahead, he swiftly prepared the appropriate Forestep movements, waiting for precisely the right moment, before mindlessly executing them with sheer and pure reflex, allowing him to surpass his normal limits when it came to execution speed.

The battle from his perspective had become rather bizarre. One moment he was doing in position, moving in a certain way. The very next moment he was elsewhere entirely, moving in an entirely different way.

It was a jarring experience, and one that he wasn't entirely accustomed to in the middle of combat, but he quickly got used to the sensation of applying it when his life was on the line.

maintain Forestep continuously since his mind did not operate at that speed, with predictions, he could circumvent the issue, but at the end of the day, even predictions were limited by the speed of the predictive

combat using Forestep continuously. Thus, half the time he was as fast as his normal self, while the other half

the onslaught of roots better

launched attack after attack, and Rui

ability to contend with Root offense confirmed,') Rui thought as he evaded yet another attack. ('Initiating counter-offense as a solution to begin closing distance between target and

SHING

SLASH

root attack. Much to his delight,

managed to inflict remarkably heavy damage on the roots with a single attack. Only

onto a root, freezing its expansion before swinging at

CRACK!

lit up as he destroyed his first

still retain their effectiveness against the roots. His current battle prowess was the result of his previous two training phases that gave him the necessary power to singlehandedly cope with an onslaught of attacks that ought to have been far beyond his capabilities as a Martial Squire who had only

as much of his Martial

and hot air attacks, Mind Palace technique, and the VOID algorithm at the core of it all, chugging away furiously in order to cope with

the impossible with what little he had. Rui felt a